Location:

Naito Laboratory, Room 205, 12 Oxford Street

Abstract:Life is anti-entropic and highly organized phenomenon with two characteristics reinforcing each other: homochirality and the stereospecific catalysis of chemical reactions. The exclusive presence of L-amino acids and R-sugars in living world well depict this. Hypothetically, the amino acids and sugars of reverse chirality could form a parallel kingdom which is highly orthogonal to the present world. The components from this mirror kingdom, such as protein or nucleic acid, will be much more resistant to the defensive mechanism of present living system, which could be of great value...

Location:

Haller Hall (Room 102), Geological Museum, 24 Oxford Street

Our goal is to understand how protocells developed signaling mechanisms that allowed them to communicate and coordinate their actions. The capability to respond to signals, move, and assemble into cohesive colonies would have significantly improved the protocells’ survivability and enhanced their functionality. Early protocells lacked complex biochemical machinery and thus, communication was most likely driven by fundamental physical/chemical mechanisms, including diffusion of molecules across the membrane. In this context, it is worth considering the behavior of primitive organisms, such...

Location:

Naito Laboratory, Room 205, 12 Oxford Street

The evolutionary space of a single enzyme is far too large to explore systematically. Despite this, there has been much success in the field of in vitro evolution, both from enzymes with starting activity and from random sequence. What can we say about the structure of evolutionary space based on these findings? What can we say about optimal methods for the discovery and improvement of enzymes? Drawing on recent experimental and theoretical work we will go over several ways by which this problem has been approached in the past and will explore questions of how to...

Location:

Haller Hall (Room 102), Geological Museum, 24 Oxford Street

Abstract:Primitive cells consisting of a self-replicating nucleic acid genome encapsulated within a self-replicating membrane would have depended upon a rich, complex and variable environment to drive their reproduction. I will describe simple and robust pathways for the coupled growth and division of primitive cell membranes composed of fatty acids and related single-chain amphiphiles. I will also discuss recent progress towards the efficient and accurate chemical replication of RNA. Chemical template-copying generally proceeds best at low...

Location:

Naito Laboratory, Room 205, 12 Oxford Street

Abstract: The central ambition of theoretical chemistry is to describe chemistry in its diversity solely as a solution to Schrodinger Equation. The difficulty of this strategy is that it has to capture development of molecular systems at multiple spatiotemporal scales which is prohibitively

expensive. Prebiological chemistry is the most challenging in this sense because the target phenomenon - the emergence of life - cannot be meaningfully represented as a collection of independent events at the level of organic reactions,...

Location:

Haller Hall (Room 102), Geological Museum, 24 Oxford Street

Abstract -

Finding just one example of a biosphere beyond the solar system wouldnot only place real constraints on life's cosmic abundance andorigins, but also allow us to place the Earth in proper context. To dothis we need to search for astronomically visible, surface dominant,living systems. One step towards this is the process of evaluating thephysical and biological environments of a diversity of rocky worlds tounderstand their climatological states. Along the way we need tobetter constrain the orbital behavior of observed exoplanetary...

Location:

Naito Laboratory, Room 205, 12 Oxford Street

Abstract: A key challenge for nanotechnology is the programmable self-assembly of complex nanostructures. Our laboratory pioneered a versatile general solution: custom three-dimensional shapes, the size of small viruses, that can be conceived as stacked sheets woven from parallel DNA double helices. Current work is focused on achieving greater complexity via hierarchical self-assembly, and exploring site-specific chemical functionalization and programmable actuation. We also have been studying capture of lipid bilayers on the surface of DNA-origami nanostructures. One of...

Location:

Science Center Hall B, One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA

Are we alone or is the universe teeming with life?is one of the most fundamental questions in science. The answer could have a dramatic impact on society and culture. Over the next decade, advances in technology will allow astronomers to address this question in new ways. I will describe a few novel techniques that could potentially detect primitive or intelligent forms of life in the solar system and around nearby stars. I will then discuss how early after the Big Bang life may have started, as well as its prospects for survival in our long-term cosmic future.

Location:

Two of life’s three domains, the Bacteria and Archaea, diversified on the early Archean Earth. The third domain – the Eukarya, or eukaryotes – evolved later, however, at least in part via symbiosis between members of the other great clades. Eukaryotic organisms radiated in Proterozoic oceans characterized by oxygenated surface waters, but, commonly, anoxia at depth. Exceptionally preserved fossils of red algae favor crown group emergence more than 1200 million years ago, but older (up to 1600-1800 million years) microfossils record a moderate diversity of stem- or early crown-...